The way Blues Boy Willie figures it, he didn’t have a choice but to go into the blues.

The music seeped into his soul from his earliest days in Memphis, thanks to the juke joints surrounding the southwest Panhandle town in the early 1950s.

His father and uncles, after touring for a time with the famed Ma Rainey Traveling Minstrel Show, gave Willie, born William Daniel McFalls, an early love of music.

Even going to school was a lesson in the blues.

“Where I started first grade, it was right across the road from a juke,” McFalls said. “All day long, I could hear the blues playing from people who didn’t have work. They’d have the jukebox going all day and night.”

And from the age of 5 or 6, McFalls was performing in the jukes himself alongside his older brothers, who would haul an upright piano to the joints ever weekend.

“I seen some rough stuff,” McFalls said recently, shaking his head.

Those early influences combined to form a man who said he’s the living embodiment of a musical style born of African-Americans across the Deep South.

Ask McFalls what he loves about the blues, and he has a simple answer: “It.”

“I am the blues. I can’t deny the true feeling you get from it. ... You have to be born with it to know what it’s all about. You have to have lived it,” he said.

McFalls, who moved back to Memphis after spending years on the “Chitlin’ Circuit,” performs at 7 p.m. Saturday at VFW Post 1475, 1401 S.W. Eighth Ave.

And McFalls has no doubt he has lived the blues.

In part that’s because what he thinks was a bad contract robbed him of any royalties off the six albums he recorded for Ichiban Records beginning in 1989.

He found chart success with “Be Who?”, a novelty song on his first album, “Strange Things Happening.”

“He’s all-around,” Rawls said of McFalls. “He can do it all, but that’s why they call him Blues Boy Willie.”

Actually, McFalls said he got the nickname in the late 1970s.

He’d been called “Little Willie” for years, but a friend suggested “Blues Boy” instead.

“I finally got to be a BB,” McFalls said, referring to B.B. King and his longtime friend Gary “B.B.” Coleman, another Memphis native who produced his first six albums.

McFalls’ latest album is a joint production with Amarillo rocker Johnny “Reverb” Holston called “Back Porch Blues,” but his seventh, “Back Again,” was produced in 2001 by Rawls, who minces no words when he talks about McFalls’ musical abilities.

“It’s just something you have to be born with,” Rawls said. “It’s nothing that you acquire later on. Some people go to school, some people practice for it. All that’s good, but it’s not how it really happens. It’s like a pro rodeo guy. You can’t just go and do that.

“The ones born with it will do it; that’s the way I feel about it.”

McFalls agreed.

“When you got it, man you got to go with it,” he said. “You got to put up with the bumps and the bruises, but I guess that’s why they call it the blues.”

how to go

✉What: Blues Boy Willie and Johnny Rawls

✉When: 7 p.m. Saturday

✉Where: VFW Post 1475, 1401 S.W. Eighth Ave.

✉How much: $10

✉Information: 806-373-3521

Editor’s note: This is the fifth in a monthly series on local bands. Up next: Lifeless 2 Life. If you or your band wants a turn in the spotlight, email a schedule to chip.chandler@amarillo.com.